What Happened?
A number of stocks fell in the afternoon session after the midday Apache helicopter incident over the Strait of Hormuz removed the stable macro backdrop the semiconductor sector needed to extend its recovery.
US Central Command confirmed an American Apache helicopter had gone down near the coast of Oman, and President Trump said the US "must respond" to what he described as an Iranian attack over the Strait of Hormuz. Chips are acutely sensitive to the inflation and rate environment and any development that re-accelerates oil prices keeps the 10-year yield elevated and compresses the high multiples the sector carries. The 10-year was already at 4.53%, and rate-hike probability for year-end already exceeded 50% before this headline.
The underlying concerns from the previous week's rout including Broadcom's cautious AI guidance, a memory chip glut, and the May jobs report pushing yields higher, hadn't resolved. The helicopter incident renewed geopolitical uncertainty just as the bounce was consolidating, pulling the sector back before the CPI reading later in the week.
The stock market overreacts to news, and big price drops can present good opportunities to buy high-quality stocks.
Among others, the following stocks were impacted:
- Memory Semiconductors company Seagate (NASDAQ: STX) fell 2.3%. Is now the time to buy Seagate? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
- Semiconductor Manufacturing company Amtech (NASDAQ: ASYS) fell 2.5%. Is now the time to buy Amtech? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
- Processors and Graphics Chips company Lattice Semiconductor (NASDAQ: LSCC) fell 4.7%. Is now the time to buy Lattice Semiconductor? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
Zooming In On Lattice Semiconductor (LSCC)
Lattice Semiconductor’s shares are extremely volatile and have had 30 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.
The previous big move we wrote about was 7 days ago when the stock gained 4.5% on the news that Jensen Huang's (Nvidia's CEO) GTC Taipei keynote at Computex reframed how large and how long the AI chip cycle will run.
The first announcement — Vera Rubin entering full production — confirmed the next wave of data center AI compute is now locked in. Vera Rubin, Nvidia's successor to Blackwell, delivers a 10x reduction in inference token cost and requires 4x fewer GPUs to train the same models. Thousands of Nvidia engineers were involved in its development, and system builders already in full-scale production include Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Supermicro, and IBM. That list is a read-through for the entire AI supply chain: every name on it needs more servers, more memory, more optical connectivity, and more chip equipment.
The second announcement carried a different charge. Nvidia unveiled RTX Spark — an Arm-based AI PC chip co-developed with MediaTek — and Jensen Huang said Nvidia and Microsoft are going to "reinvent the PC." RTX Spark integrates a Blackwell GPU and a Grace CPU on a single package with 128GB of unified memory, capable of running 120-billion-parameter AI models locally without cloud connectivity. It launches later in the year on Windows PCs from Microsoft, Dell, HP, ASUS, Lenovo, and MSI.
Lattice Semiconductor is up 71.6% since the beginning of the year, but at $134.97 per share, it is still trading 12.7% below its 52-week high of $154.60 from June 2026. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Lattice Semiconductor’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $2,701.
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